Lewis Hanke

Lewis Hanke (1905–1993) was a preeminent U.S. historian of colonial Latin America, and is best known for his writings on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Hanke, along with two others, Irving A. Leonard and John T. Lanning, presented a revisionist narrative of colonial history that focused on the role of Bartolomé de las Casas, who famously advocated for the rights of Native Americans, and searched for just resolutions to the tensions between the conquistadores and the natives during the colonial period of Spanish rule. Hanke's writings documented Las Casas' work as a political activist, historian, political theorist, and anthropologist. His scholarship also uncovered evidence to support Hanke’s claim that Las Casas did not act as the sole voice of conscience during the colonial era, but actually constituted the head of what was a larger reform movement by a number of Spanish colonists to prevent "the destruction of the Indies.”[1]

To many, Hanke is considered the father of the field of Latin American studies in the United States. He created the Handbook of Latin American Studies, and that, along with his considerable historiographical achievements in Latin American history, continue to figure among the foundational works of Latin American studies research and library collections in both the U.S. and abroad.[4]

Hanke edited the Guide to the Study of US History Outside the US, 1945-1980, and the year before his retirement, he served as the president of the American Historical Association, where he oversaw the re-writing of the AHA’s charter.

Hanke died on March 26, 1993, eight days after the death of his wife, Kate Gilbert Hanke. She was "la Querida Compañera de Mi Vida." [5]

At Harvard, Hanke studied under Clarence H. Haring. During that time, Hanke published the first of his works on Bartolomé de las Casas, Las teorías políticas de Bartolomé de Las Casas and The First Social Experiments in America: A Study of the Development of Spanish Indian Policy in the Sixteenth Century. In 1936, Hanke graduated from Harvard with a degree in history. Unable to get a job during the Great Depression, Hanke was appointed director of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress in 1939, where he served for 12 years. His most influential work, The Spanish Struggle (1949), argues that “… the Spanish conquest of America was far more than a remarkable military and political exploit; that it was also one of the greatest attempts the world has seen to make Christian precepts prevail in the relations between peoples."[6] This underscores Hanke’s idealistic view of Las Casas, and cuts against the prevailing narrative, then and now, of the Spanish colonists as a uniformly exploitative, hostile force vis à vis the native Americans. Hanke went on to pen works that continued to explore the concept of "the Spanish struggle for justice", as well as on topics ranging from the city of Potosi to the Good Neighbor policy.[7]